Standout Scenes

I can only think of three occasions on which I've bought a comic for a single scene. It's not uncommon for a standout scene to sway my decision to purchase a book, to prove to me that the writer or the story has something special to offer. (The "you cut down the tree, but you still miss its shade" scene in the first issue of Brett Matthews' Lone Ranger, for instance.) But to buy a single issue of a comic, without picking up the larger storyline of which it is a part, simply because of one scene so good that I needed to have that in my library, that's only happened to me thrice.

The three scenes in question:

1) X-Men #59 (Scott Lobdell) - Jean Grey-Summers finds her husband Scott hiding out in a movie theater, watching Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Many readers think of Scott Summers merely as Cyclops, humorless general of Xavier's army; it's great to see him in a quieter moment, to recognize he has hobbies and passions that have nothing to do with the X-Men or the mutant cause.

2) Marvel Knights 4 #4 (Roberto Aguire-Sacasa) - Reed Richards talks a jumper down off a ledge. When Reed makes a promise to the jumper, and assures him that not even Dr. Doom or Galactcus could keep Reed from fulfilling it, we know this is no exaggeration; Richards is as honest as his legs get long.

And lately, 3) Ultimate Fantastic Four #58 (Joe Pokaski) - A flashback shows how Reed Richards and Ben Grimm became friends. We know their unlikely bond is going to carry them through the direst of circumstances, including the failed experiment that traps Grimm beneath the Thing's rocky hide.

None of these scenes has anything to do with super-powers (unless you count Reed taking a giant stretchy step up to a ledge) or saving the world. They're simple stories, well told: a wife learning something new about her husband, the compassion of a stranger, two boys each finding a brother in the last person they'd have expected. None of these moments would be out of place in a stage play, yet they're all the more meaningful for being set against the colorful, hyperbolic backdrop of comic book super-heroics.

- JC

[He's not mentioning how big a part simple comic scenes like these have played elsewhere in his life, like when he had to show me a panel of Reed and Sue talking about kissing after our first make-out session. I'm not even joking. - RD]

Marvel Gender Benders

So I've been catching up on Mike Carey's X-Men: Legacy this week ("Sins of the Father" in trade paperback, the "Original Sin" crossover with Wolverine: Origins in hardcover), and just learned that there is now a female clone of X-Men arch-foe Mr. Sinister running around the universe called, wait for it, Miss Sinister.

Really, Marvel? Really?

She boasts Mr. Sinister's trademark pasty complexion/red forehead diamond, but displays none of his mystique (no pun intended) or scientific prowess. Where Mr. Sinister was a grand manipulator, playing a mad game of destiny dominoes to suit some vaguely Darwinist agenda - a cloning here, a misfit massacre over there - his feminine successor seems so far to be little more than a third-rate telepath in thrall to the Hellfire Club's Sebastian Shaw.

Of course, she's hardly unique; these trans-gendered villains are popping up all over the place. Spider-Man has recently been targeted by a new Kraven the Hunter, who happens to be the 12-year-old daughter of the original. Another old X-Men villain, the illusionist Mastermind, has two daughters running around, both having inherited his powers and squabbling over his name. Daredevil is sparring with a Lady Bullseye, and Thor's trickster-god brother Loki has actually become a woman himself.

Some of these characters feature in some very well-told stories. But looking at the trend on the whole, I can't help but wonder what message Marvel thinks it's sending by replacing a bunch of aging male villains with female proxies. Do they think this is fine feminism, to show sisters doing it for themselves just like the boys did it before them, with the boys' borrowed identities? If Marvel has a Femme Fatale quota to fill, wouldn't they get more points by creating some villainesses that are actually unique, with their own abilities and backstories? Or do they think the fans won't get excited about a new villian if she doesn't have some familiar hook, a connection to what's gone before?

Tell me your thoughts. I'd love to know what others are making of all this. In the meantime, I'll be over here trying to guess who Marvel will boobify next. Victoria Von Doom? The Queenpin? Magneta*?

- JC

*In fanfic she would be called Magenta and she would spend all her time hanging with her BFF Rouge.

X-Men:First Class: Finals

Jeff's Parker's four-part X-Men: First Class: Finals miniseries bids a fond farewell to a classic Marvel flashback, fills in a long-neglected gap in X-history, and neatly sets up Scott Gray's upcoming Uncanny X-Men First Class. In the days just before Wolverine, Storm, etc. burst onto the mutant scene in "Giant Size X-Men #1," the original five X-Men are preparing to leave Xavier's School with college degrees and head out into the real world. But wouldn't you know it? Some mysterious adversary is forcing them to confront old foes (all from Parker's series) one last time.

Along the way, Parker drops in answers to questions fans have been asking since the 60s and 70s. Presumably. I wasn't born then. We find out why the X-Men switched to more individualized uniforms, why Professor Xavier went from running a school for "The Strangest Teens of All!" to overseeing a pseudo-military team of adult mutants from around the world, and even how a classy girl like Jean could possibly have designed the suspendered nightmare that was Angel's first attempt at a unique costume.

And in the end, we learn that the bad guy bombarding the team with Parker's greatest hits is none other than Jean Grey, and I discover a facet of my favorite relationship in comics that I'd never quite caught on to before. I'd always seen Scott and Jean primarily as two straight-arrows, wanting nothing more than to do right and take care of their great big X-Men family. Less important, I thought, were the very different ways they experienced and dealt with power. Scott's struggle was with a physical handicap, Jean's with a metaphysical question of how much power she can use before it must corrupt her.

Finals showed that both Scott and Jean's power struggles are ultimately emotional. Here we learn that as Jean's telepathic abilities grew, her subconscious fears and traumatic memories began to manifest as what Xavier called "ambient dreams," forcing themselves on those around her. The Professor explains, "As a mentally enhanced mutant, it's important that her mind be disciplined. Objective," meaning that Jean's power demands a figurative clarity of vision, just as Scott's does a literal one. And for Jean, just as much as for Scott, power has always been overshadowed by childhood pain. Scott lost his parents in the plane crash which also deprived him of the ability to control his optic blasts; Jean first experienced telepathy in the moment her friend was killed in a car crash. One lost a family, the other a best friend, and they found both again in one another - making their continual efforts at control a little less burdensome.

And those who say Scott Summers wasn't "a real grown up" or "free" or "truly happy" until Emma Frost came along can suck it.

The first 3 Finals issues also feature a back-up story by Parker, irresistably drawn by Colleen Coover: "Scott & Jean Are On a Date!" Honestly, they had me at the title, but you have to love a Marvel series that manages to work a playful newspaper-style comic strip into its continuity, and in the oh-so-angsty X-verse to boot.

- JC

Iron Man: Armored Adventures

As with most comic book heroes, there's always been a distinct element of power fantasy to Iron Man. But it's not just the fact that Tony Stark has a cool suit of armor and gets to fly around and blast robots. The fact that he's a billionaire inventor with his own company has always been just as important to the vibe, to making readers and moviegoers not just want to hang out with Tony, but to BE him. He flies around the world on a whim, vacations in exotic locations, and gets the babes wherever he goes. He runs a business, has lunch meetings with the movers and shakers of the world, and then runs back to his garage to tinker with the next high-tech toy. He's Steve Jobs as James Bond.

Not so in Marvel Animation's new Iron Man: Armored Adventures cartoon. Here Stan Lee's famous billionaire industrialist/playboy Tony Stark has been redesigned as a sixteen-year-old who first puts on the Iron Man armor after his father's murder. Tony's still rich, but his company's being run by the man he's sure killed his dad (ostensibly until Tony turns 18 or exposes Obadiah Stane for the villain he is). When he's not flying around town in his new armor, he's struggling through high school with his friends Jim "Rhodey" Rhodes and Pepper Potts. It's cute, sure, watching the rich genius kid trying to cope with the banalities of his classes and being badgered by the more down-to-earth Rhodey and Pepper. But is it Iron Man?

At one point in the 4th episode, as Tony angsts about finding evidence against his father's murderer, Rhodey points out that his dad would just want him to live and enjoy a normal life. And therein lies the rub. In the comics and the movie, Tony Stark never had any problem enjoying his normal life, even with all the superheroics going on. This isn't to say it made him happy, that he didn't still internally monologue in grand Stan Lee fashion about the life and the relationships he REALLY wanted, but he still always found time to go to the parties, to date the girls, to at least enjoy the surface pleasures his money made possible. So who is this Tony?

IM: Armored Adventures is an entertaining enough superhero cartoon, with likable characters, witty dialogue, and some slick computer-animated action sequences, but it it feels more like an amalgamation of Batman ("I'm rich, and I will avenge my father!") and Spider-Man ("aww, man, how do I juggle the responsibilities of my power with a normal teenage life?") than a story of Stark. If I have some free time and a hankering for a generic superhero show, I'll catch up on the episodes, but it doesn't have the intrinsic Iron Man quality that makes me look forward to it as I do the next Matt Fraction issue, or even Iron Man 2 on the big screen.

- JC

Astonishing X-Men

The X-Men have long been my favorite characters in comics. Yet I've had a hard time really appreciating the main X-books since about 2001, when Grant Morrison began his run on New X-Men. The plots were needlessly convoluted and the characters seemed to be alienated from each other, but the biggest reason for my dislike came down to his treatment of just two characters: Scott Summers and Jean Grey. Morrison took Cyclops, the X-Men's ultimate idealistic boy scout, and turned him into a wimp-ass wannabe bad boy. He took Jean, who had emerged from the shadow of the Phoenix entity in the 1990s to become a truly formidable leader, rebonded her to the Phoenix, and reduced her to the fanboy distortion of "that chick who dies a lot." And in the process, he tore apart their marriage, which I would still argue is the greatest love story in comics.

Now, I'm not saying there haven't been great X-Men stories told since Morrison's reign. But without Scott Summers and Jean Grey at the center of them - with Scott instead shacked up with Emma Frost, with whom he had a psychic affair before Jean's death - they just haven't been my X-Men.

Which kind of makes Joss Whedon's run on Astonishing X-Men live up to its name all the more. I've just finished reading it all, start to finish, for the second time, and I still don't hate it.
Joss immediately sets right a lot of what Morrison muddled. He puts the X-Men back in spandex, gets them back in the game of reaching out to the human community by being superheroes rather than holing up in the mansion and teaching mutant kids how much better they are than humans. He gives Cyclops his idealism back, and shows us the X-Men actually enjoying each others' company again (even as they wind up in fist-fights every other page). They're a family. An endlessly squabbling family that expects the world of one another, but what family doesn't?

What's more, the Whedon issues of Astonishing X-Men offer some of the finest visual storytelling in comics. The "camera angles," the intercutting between parallel scenes, the characters' body language and blocking, it's all brilliant. The scene where Colossus returns from the dead is a perfect example: the guards' bullets pass through Kitty Pryde and ping off something in the shadows; Colossus steps out; Kitty freezes, Colossus running right through her to take down the guards, but the view remains locked on Kitty and the shock on her face. It's perfect. I'd love to get my hands on some of the scripts, and really pick apart how much of this was planned by Whedon and how much was the genius of artist John Cassaday.

But the really weird part? When Joss is writing them, I don't even hate Scott & Emma as a couple. Don't get me wrong; I still hate how it started and the revisionist writers who try to suggest Scott & Jean were never good for one another. (Joss has Emma suggest it, but Scott clearly isn't buying in.) But Joss emphasizes two people with ridiculous cases of survivor's guilt - for different reasons, from different pasts - coming together, each seeing the other very differently from how they see themselves, and trying to be better together. It's almost kinda cool. I still want Jean to come back, I still want to see her and Scott put back together, but I don't have to hate the Scott/Emma relationship as a step along Scott's journey.

- JC

Detective Comics 853

Detective Comics 853, part 2 of Neil Gaiman's "Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?" is exactly the conclusion I was expecting, and nothing like it at all. The funeral, the parade of Batman's friends and foes telling contradictory versions of his life and death, does indeed turn out to be a near-death experience. Bruce Wayne may not yet be deceased, but "very close," and it's not just his life flashing before his eyes, but all the lives he could've lived. Together, the stories show him that no matter what else may change, the Batman will always be fighting the same fight, and the only way he'll ever quit is to die, which was the same theme I picked out in my review of part 1. The woman heard talking to Bruce in the story's first half, it turns out, is Bruce's mother. She's shows him one more life he lived, for far too short a time: the life of an unusually happy child (Bruce Wayne? Who'da thunk it?), taking great joy in a simple picture book. And she hints that he's about to live that life all over again, to enjoy those too-few happy years once more, as the cycle begins anew.

Is Bat-continuity headed for another reboot or retcon? Is Bruce Wayne somehow being reincarnated into his own former life? Or is it all just a story being told and retold? In the end, as Mrs. Wayne encourages her son to tell the tale himself in the form of the classic children's book "Goodnight Moon," I realize that "Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?" is less of a plot and more of a graphic poem. And it all leads up to a truly stunning transmogrification of the Bat-Signal, a two-page spread that alone is worth the price of admission.

When I closed the comic, I thought all that was missing was a punchline for the gag in part 1 about the kid who parked the Joker's car. And then things got interesting.

I put the comic aside to take a nap. And as I slept, I dreamt that I flipped back through the comic again, certain a master like Gaiman wouldn't have set up such a great gag in part 1 and failed to follow it through in the finale, sure that I must simply have missed that page or panel. And sure enough, in my dream, I found it: a page where that kid grows up with that fear of the Joker, that certainty that death is waiting for him around every corner, and the fear turns him into Joe Chill. He murders Bruce's parents, becoming part of the endless cycle. Was this page somehow real? Could there be a secret piece of "Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?" that can only be read between falling asleep and waking? If any comic creator could craft such an experience, it would be Gaiman, wouldn't it?

- JC

another station break

Pardon the span of time between posts; RD is the one who usually edits and uploads JC's blog entries and she's been in Australia and New Zealand for work for the past couple of weeks. JC forgot the password to post to the blog himself. We've got three great posts in the works, so stick around.

- JC & RD